bella613's Reviews (551)

This one was cute. I haven’t actually read the hating game, but I watched it. I listened to this because I loved that one. It’s not quite as good but it’s a fun read and there aren’t giant red flags all over the relationship (low bar, I know).
I liked the characters, and the premise, but I did put it down a couple times because it didn’t hold me captive. The narrator was good and easy to listen to.

This was a decent story but I really didn’t like the FL. She was very hateful, childish, and pessimistic toward everything and everyone in her life. She literally never stopped complaining and thinking the worst. And that didn’t change at all, even at the end of the book when she was supposed to have changed, or grown, from the retreat.

She might be willing to quit her job at the end, but she didn’t change her opinions on the industry because she seemed to have felt that way at the beginning too. Most of her reasoning for abandoning the project was guilt.

I appreciate a rom-com that isn’t super graphic or full of sex scenes, so this one was definitely good in that area. 
The writing style was entertaining and the narrator did a good job. Very predictable storyline but sometimes that’s exactly what I want for an audiobook, so I can clean or whatever while listening. Simple detail in the story so I listened at a little over 2x. 

I did like the ideas around the retreat and what happened there, although it’s not very believable that it’s kept that secret without NDA’s or that it actually works for couples in real trouble. There was no couples therapy, but it sounded like a nice getaway on a private island which is exactly what you’d expect from this type of thing. The whole idea of this one is, you’re supposed to feel closer to each other in shared hate of the circumstances and leader of the retreat. But I think in reality it would be simply getting away from the distractions of daily life and focusing on the person you’re with. Most of the things the FL was so upset about would not have been something to blink twice at. (She really hates the outdoors and healthy food) It did sound like a summer camp for rich adults.

Overall, I’m not impressed but I was entertained enough in the moment.

**For the TW I added miscarriage because an ectopic pregnancy is briefly mentioned and there’s no option for that. 

It sounds like this is a fun book for people who grew up knowing Kelly Ripa and enjoy this type of humor, but it was not my cup of tea. 
I didn’t find her funny at all, but she clearly thinks she is, which was a little off putting. The title is very suitable for the book— it was pretty long winded for the content you get out of it. I don’t want to be too harsh on her personally, since I had never heard her name before listening to it and didn’t have any sentimental connection to her (as it seems a lot of other reviewers did). But I have read and enjoyed plenty of story collections and memoirs by people I didn’t know much about. This one didn’t do the trick for me.
This book was recommended to me by spotify because I’d added  several memoirs to my library (yes I know it’s not actually a memoir) and I decided to listen to it because  other people said it was funny. It felt more like listening to a teenager self-deprecate to get compliments.   Again, maybe it’s just someone else’s type of humor and not mine. 

My mindset on relating to people tends to be more about how they think than what experiences they’ve had. Kelly didn’t feel relatable to me even though that’s clearly the goal of the book. Of course once I had started the book I was too stubborn to put it down. But for me, it wasn’t worth the listen. 

This book kept me somewhat entertained and was a fine listen, but the characters were flat and the story very predictable. The antagonists felt like caricatures of the stereotypical privileged male, with no depth whatsoever. I liked the storytelling, and the narrator of the audiobook is great. But the book would benefit from slower plot movement and more complexity. 

I know that the plot kind of hinges on the fact that the three “storylines” are based on famous horrors and thrillers, but I was hoping for some twists. I imagine that the author made it straightforward to emphasize the antagonist’s inadequacies, but it felt rushed, like the characters had to figure it out and escape immediately. If the characters and their situations were fleshed out more (especially the antagonist(s)) this probably could have been three or four books.

The fourth and last part of the book was anticlimactic and disappointing. I could have overlooked the simplicity of the three scenarios the girls were placed in if there was more behind it, as a greater plot. But it’s like the antagonist is just an embodiment of the word “misogyny” and not a real person. 

There was so much lacking in the setup as a whole that it wasn’t scary or thought-provoking at all. I was almost in disbelief at how badly the antagonists performed. If this guy was willing and capable of spending the kind of time, money, and effort it takes to set up an entire truman show / hunger games / squid game style arena, the team would have been a lot larger than 20 some people. If he really found the women off of online chats and managed to look far enough into their real lives to find people willing to pay to see them dead, he wouldn’t take any chances of failing. Why would he be so thorough and then abandon all effort? And assuming his interest in the genre to get him on those online chats in the first place, it doesn’t really make sense that he would half-ass such an elaborate plan. If it was too much to do three different arenas he could have just put them all in one, or at least done them one at a time so that his actors/employees/henchman? didn’t have multiple places to be at once. His explanations at the end were such a let down. What, he did all this to prove that women are dumb and weak? Who was he proving it to? No one was watching but him. I know misogynistic men are small minded, but no human is that brainless. 

Really cute book and if I’d read it in middle school I probably would have given it 5 stars. Perfect for a light listen but very predictable and not much to it. I enjoyed it for that since that’s what I was looking for. 

Good story concept, and well planned plot, but it was definitely one of those first-of-series books that’s doing a lot of set-up for the characters. The narrator sounded like a dramatic poetry reader- every sentence was extremely dramatic and not normal inflection for storytelling. But that sort of fits the first person pov since the FL is  traumatized and neglected.